If He Had Been with Me

by Laura Nowlin

If he had been with me, everything would have been different.

Sometimes I am disappointed with love. I thought that when you were in love, it would always be right there, staring you in the face, reminding you every moment that you love this person. It seems that it isn’t always like that.

I love him the most when we fight and I am scared that he will leave me. After we fight, I want so much to be close to him,

Sometimes he loves me more than I love him, and he wants me to pay attention to him, but I wish he would leave me alone so that I could go back to reading or talking to Angie about Mrs. Adams.

They told me about chemical imbalances and how it was a sickness like any other, and that Mom would get better.

I tell him that I found out that they

only hospitalize you if you’re suicidal. I tell him it’s supposed to be genetic.

I tell myself relationships are hard work. No one is perfect. There’s no such thing as happily ever after.

I ask Jamie if I can have a baby goat when we get married. He says no, and then says maybe, if it means he doesn’t have to mow the lawn.

I love him in a way I cannot define, as if my love were an organ within my body that I could not live without yet could not pick out of an anatomy book.

I do not love him the way I love Jamie. It’s not the way I love Sasha or my mother or Mr. Laughegan. It’s the way I love Finny.

“Will you still want to talk to me when you’re sober?”

sometimes sad things are beautiful,”

I want to savor this wonder, this happening of loving a book and reading it for the first time, because the first time is always the best, and I will never read this book for the first time ever again.

“Try to marry your first love. For the rest of your life, no one will ever treat you as well.”

Isn’t this what all the children’s books and movies are always about? How even if the task seems impossible or you’re too small or you don’t have the right kind of whatever, you’re still supposed to try? Until you get to high school and suddenly you’re supposed to choose a safe path. A path that won’t take you too far from home. A path that isn’t too risky. A path that has health insurance and a 401(k).

I’m in love with Finny.

I’ve loved him my whole life, and somewhere along the way, that love didn’t change but grew. It grew to fill the parts of me that I did not have when I was a child. It grew with every new longing in my body and desire in my heart until there was not a piece of me that did not love him. And when I look at him, there is no other feeling in me.

My love for Finny is buried like a stillborn child; it is just as cherished and just as real, but nothing will ever come of it. I imagine it wrapped up in lace, tucked away in a quiet corner of my heart. It will stay there for the rest of my life, and when I die, it will die with me.

And I know that winter is supposed to end, but things are not always the way they are supposed to be.

This is friendship, and it is love, but I already know what they have not learned yet; how dangerous friendship is, how damaging love can be.

Perhaps he would ask me what books mean to me. I would tell him that it means living another life;

“You need me a lot, and it’s more than I can handle. You’re depressed all the time—”

Finny grins at me, and I finally realize that I never, never felt this way about Jamie, even at the best of times.